Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution

"I have no desire to live since I have done 'Eureka.' I could accomplish nothing more" (Letters 2: 452). Poe wrote these words to his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, in July of 1849--only three months prior to his death. Nearly a year after the publication of Eureka: A Prose-Poem (1848), Poe still considered it his last word, that toward which all his previous writing had been vectored. As if having finally said what he had been trying to say all along, Poe felt his body of work, his career, and his life were complete. ¹ Considering the many kinds of writing within that body of work, the generic classification of Poe's last--and to him, his greatest--opus is a difficult but important matter. In what genre did Poe choose to say his final word? Eureka would seem to be prose, but the matter is not so simple. Classifying the text is difficult not just because Poe wrote in so many genres (poetry, drama, criticism, tales, and--his own invention--the detective story) but also because Eureka claims to be all of these things, if not more. Eureka's generic aspirations serve as an index to the work the text is doing or purporting to do. And that work is the subject of this essay, namely, Poe's reorientation of American literary culture, his theorization in Eureka of the homology as well as the cause-and-effect relationship between literary and political formations, in which literary documents supplement or complement the operative documents of state formation and thereby validate the state as it was intended if not actualized by those foundational texts. As the intentionally constructed founding document of a literary culture that had not before existed, Eureka is Poe's attempt to answer the question of what literary culture comes to in America, that is, in an unchurched or posttheological society. ²

According to its subtitle, Eureka is a "prose-poem," a hybrid of the genre that Poe wrote the most about (poetry) and the genre he wrote the most in (prose). In the preface to Eureka, Poe further complicates the text's generic status by characterizing it as a love letter, an "Art-Product," a "Romance," and "a Book of Truths" (the last evoking both prophecy and arcana). Then, as if sweeping away all previous categorizations, Poe insists that it be judged "as a Poem only" (Poetry and Tales [PT] 1259). Poe's presentation of Eureka as a text that satisfies the criteria of several different genres and then, finally, "as a Poem only" can be read as a kind of generic recruitment, an attempt by one genre (poetry) to encompass many others. This recruitment is hardly final, and the text's refusal to settle within a single genre is meaningful enough to be pursued later in this essay. For the time being, however, let us take Poe at his word (that Eureka is a poem), for our compliance permits us to see what work the author imagines poetry as doing: dissolving generic and disciplinary boundaries (boundaries separating literature from science and the literary from the social) and consequently getting at the mechanism of American social formation by addressing the terms of its foundation.

If Eureka is "a Poem only," then it is poetic speech written against metricality, an example of literary formation not restricted to linear structure. Further, Eureka's generic ambivalence--as a long poem (nonmetrical in character) that is also a prose poem--foregrounds the attempt to keep genre open and problematic in relation to a social structure that seeks the maintenance of the relation of persons on a nonhegemonic basis. Eureka founds a tradition of American texts that attempt to form a social order that is consistent with the equality proposition, to realize and institute the ideal upon which the nation's first document (the Declaration of Independence) and thus the nation...